Tag Archives: drugs

Weight Watchers Goes Bankrupt After Rise of Ozempic-Like Drugs

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Ozempic is massively threatening the established diet industry — and it appears that Weight Watchers is now getting the hatchet. 

Ozempic and other drugs like it have been threatening the established diet industry since they premiered — and it appears that Weight Watchers is now getting the hatchet.

In a note to investors, the long-running weight loss company is taking the "strategic action" of filing for bankruptcy in hopes of consolidating its immense $1.15 billion dollars' worth of debt.

The move comes nearly eighteen months after Oprah Winfrey, a Weight Watchers investor who served as the celebrity face and body of the diet company, admitted that she had started taking weight loss drugs like Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Wegovy.

Just a few months after that, Winfrey announced that she was exiting WW's board of directors and questioned the company's purpose alongside the advent of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist drugs, the class of medications to which Ozempic and other popular weight loss injectables belong. The drugs are believed to work by mimicking the stomach's feeling of fullness, lowering blood sugar in diabetics and preventing overeating in non-diabetic overweight people.

Though WW mentioned neither Ozempic nor the class of drugs it belongs to in its bankruptcy statement, its specter haunted the announcement — especially because the company is apparently looking to expand its telehealth services.

Back in October, WW announced that it would be offering compounded versions of semaglutide, the GLP-1 behind Novo Nordisk's Ozempic and Wegovy. That branded compounding market, however, is both clogged with companies looking to cash in on the GLP-1 craze and, more importantly, rife with safety and quality control concerns.

Considering that workout meetings were once considered the company's main value proposition — one that had already been existentially threatened by the rise of fitness apps years before the GLP-1 revolution — it's not exactly surprising that WW's compounded GLP-1 gambit hasn't taken off as the company may have liked.

Confirmation of WW's filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which will not cease its operations but rather help it reorganize its structure and consolidate its debt, follows leaks to the Wall Street Journal last month that it was preparing for the filing.

In a WSJ interview following the confirmation of the bankruptcy news, artist and veteran WW member Naomi Nemtzow expressed her frustration at the company's pivot to telehealth and weight loss meds. As the New York Times documented back in 2023, the company abruptly ended its meeting in her Brooklyn neighborhood, leaving a void that she and her fellow former Weight Watchers had to fill themselves.

"Basically they gave up on the kind of work they had been doing and went on to selling Ozempic. They jumped on that bandwagon," the 75-year-old artist told the newspaper. "It’s become a quick fix, a fashion thing."

Critical impressions aside, Nemtzow's irked opinion does seem to indicate that WW is now suffering for its attempts to stay apace of the latest weight loss trend instead of doubling down on its bread and butter.

Then again, Weight Watchers was also a huge part of the fad diet craze in the 1990s and 2000s — so maybe, this is nature taking its course.

More on weight loss drugs: Human Experiments on GLP-1 Pill Looking Extremely Promising

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Giving ADHD Drugs to Kids Has a Long-Term Side Effect That Might Change Their Minds About Taking It

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ADHD drugs may have bizarre side effects for kids who take them while they're growing — and it's a tall order as to whether they're worth it.

As wildly overinvolved parents shell out to give their kids growth hormones to make them taller, some research suggests that putting them on drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have the opposite effect.

As the New York Times reports, the scientists behind the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, or MTA Study for short, weren't exactly looking for physiological changes in their subjects: a cohort of 579 kids with ADHD, some of whom were given methyphenidate (better known as Ritalin), counseling, a mix of the two, or neither.

Beginning in 1994, researchers across the country began tracking outcomes of children who were seven to ten years old at the start of the study. After 36 months, the researchers realized something odd: that the children who had been given the popular stimulant seemed to be growing more slowly than their non-medicated counterparts.

The researchers presumed, per their retelling to the NYT, that this "height gap" would close in adolescence. When they followed up with them nine years after the study began, however, the medicated cohort was still 1.6 inches, on average, shorter than the kids who didn't take Ritalin.

On a certain level, the concern is very shallow. There's nothing wrong with being short, and if a drug can help with a myriad of other symptoms, maybe the risk is worth it.

But that's not the only controversy around prescribing ADHD drugs to kids. The MTA study's biggest takeaway was, troublingly, that the attention benefits of Ritalin seemed to cease after the first year, and that there were no apparent benefits to academic performance.

And even on top of that, the "height suppression" side effect was also enough to give the researchers pause.

In 2017, the MTA study scientists published a follow-up looking into the height gap that tracked the original cohort until they were 25. That height gap remained, per the study, into adulthood. And the findings countered bold academic assertions from just a few years prior claiming that any height suppression from ADHD meds in children would, as the researchers initially presumed, ultimately be undone in adolescence.

Years later, another group of scientists reviewed 18 childhood Ritalin studies and found, similarly to the MTA researchers, that the drug can indeed "result in reduction in height and weight" — though their opinion was that the size of the effect is negligible when compared to the purported benefits of these drugs.

To this day, researchers can't agree as to whether or not stimulants can cause height suppression in children, primarily because the mechanism behind the demonstrated effect remains unknown.

Speaking to the website Health Central in 2022, childhood psychiatrist and MTA study co-author Laurence Greenhill of the University of California, San Francisco suggested that amphetamines' well-known propensity to suppress appetite could be behind the growth differences.

"There could be some lack of nutrition going on that explains this," Greenhill told the website.

"However, the kids aren't malnourished," he countered. "They're just growing a little more slowly."

If Ritalin or other stimulants help a child significantly, such a minor height disparity would be worthwhile. But with some of the original MTA study authors now questioning how effective these medical interventions really are, it may behoove parents to think before they put their kids on these pills.

More on ADHD meds: To Fill Your Adderall Prescription Amid Shortage, Try Getting It Filled on This Particular Day of the Month

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New Law Would Allow AI to Replace Your Doctor, Prescribe Drugs

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A bold new bill to allow AI chatbots to prescribe controlled drugs has been introduced into the House for review.

If you weren't convinced we're spiraling toward an actual cyberpunk future, a new bill seeking to let AI prescribe controlled drugs just might.

The proposed law was introduced in the House of Representatives by Arizona's David Schweikert this month, where it was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for review. Its purpose: to "amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to clarify that artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies can qualify as a practitioner eligible to prescribe drugs."

In theory, it sounds good. Engaging with the American healthcare system often feels like hitting yourself with a slow-motion brick, so the prospect of a perfect AI-powered medical practitioner that could empathically advise on symptoms, promote a healthy lifestyle, and dispense crucial medication sounds like a promising alternative.

But in practice, today's AI isn't anywhere near where it'd need to be to provide any of that, nevermind prescribing potentially dangerous drugs, and it's not clear that it'll ever get there.

Schweikert's bill doesn't quite declare a free-for-all — it caveats that these robodoctors could only be deployed "if authorized by the State involved and approved, cleared, or authorized by the Food and Drug Administration" — but downrange, AI medicine is clearly the goal. Our lawmakers evidently feel the time — and money — is right to remove the brakes and start letting AI into the health care system.

The Congressman's optimism aside, AI has already fumbled in healthcare repeatedly — like the time an OpenAI-powered medical record tool was caught fabricating patients' medical histories, or when a Microsoft diagnostic tool confidently asserted that the average hospital was haunted by numerous ghosts, or when an eating disorder helpline's AI Chatbot went off the rails and started encouraging users to engage in disordered eating.

Researchers agree. "Existing evaluations are insufficient to understand clinical utility and risks because LLMs [large language models] might unexpectedly alter clinical decision making," reads a critical study from medical journal The Lancet, adding that "physicians might use LLMs’ assessments instead of using LLM responses to facilitate the communication of their own assessments."

There's also a social concern: today's AI is notoriously easy to exploit, meaning patients would inevitably try — and likely succeed — to trick AI doctors into prescribing addictive drugs without any accountability or oversight.

For what it's worth, Schweikert used to agree. In a blurb from July of last year, the Congressman is quoted saying that the "next step is understanding how this type of technology fits 'into everything from building medical records, tracking you, helping you manage any pharmaceuticals you use for your heart issues, even down to producing datasets for your cardiologist to remotely look at your data.'"

He seems to have moved on from that cautious optimism, instead adopting the move-fast-break-things grindset that spits untested self driving cars onto our roads and AI Hitlerbots into our feeds — all without our consent, of course.

As the race to profitability in AI heats up, the demand for real-world use cases is growing. And as it does, tech companies are faced with immense pressure to pump out its latest iteration, the next big boom.

But the consequences of corner-cutting in the medical world are steep, and big tech has shown time and again that it would rather rush its products to market and shunt social responsibility onto us — filling our schools with ahistorical Anne Frank bots and AI buddies that drive teens toward suicide and self-harm.

Deregulation like the kind Schweikert proposes is exactly how big tech gets away with these offenses, such as training GenAI models on patient records without consent. It does nothing to ensure that subject matter experts are involved at any step in the process, or that we thoroughly consider the common good before the corporate good.

And as our lawmakers hand these tech firms the keys to the kingdom, it's often the most vulnerable who are harmed first — recall the bombshell revelation that the biggest and flashiest AI models are built on the backs of sweatshop workers.

When it comes to AI outpatient care, you don't need to be Cory Doctorow to imagine a world of stratified healthcare — well, anymore than we already have — where the wealthiest among us have access to real, human doctors, and the rest of us are left with the unpredictable AI equivalent.

And in the era of Donald Trump's full embrace of AI, it's not hard to imagine another executive order or federal partnership making AI pharmacists a reality without that pesky oversight.

More on tech and drugs: Congress Furious With Mark Zuckerberg for Making Money From Illegal Drug Ads

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Woman Annoyed When She Gets on Wegovy and It Does Nothing

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For some, the issue with GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy isn't getting access to these game-changing medications, but having them not work.

The fever-pitch hype around GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro makes them sound like game-changing medications, and for many they are — but for other patients, the experience is totally underwhelming.

In an interview with the Associated Press, 38-year-old Danielle Griffin said that although she was able to get a prescription for Novo Nordisk's weight loss shot Wegovy — and even got it covered by her insurance, which is still often a struggle — the medication just didn't work for her.

"I have been on Wegovy for a year and a half," Griffin said, "and have only lost 13 pounds."

Despite doing "everything right," including dieting, exercising, and drinking lots of water, she's had "no success" with the popular weight loss injectable.

"It’s discouraging," Giffin said.

While there's been scrutiny on a laundry list of side effects that can come with glucagon-like peptide-1 drugs, which seem to work by mimicking the body's feeling of fullness, non-responsiveness of this sort hasn't captured much attention.

Obesity experts told the AP, however, that up to 20 percent — or one in every five patients — may not lose weight on the drugs at all.

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the news wire that because "different people have different responses," these drugs won't work the same for everyone who takes them.

From medications that stymie weight loss to differences in brain and gut chemistry, lots of factors influence how people metabolize GLP-1s, the Mass General doctor said.

"[Obesity] is a disease that stems from the brain," Stanford said. "The dysfunction may not be the same."

Endocrine specialist Jody Dushay of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center said that she's also seen people have issues losing weight with GLP-1s — though generally, she and her patients are able to tell whether they're going to work within a few weeks.

Between non-responsiveness and undesirable gastrointestinal side effects like vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea, those who run into issues with drugs like Wegovy often feel at wit's end, Dushay said. There are plenty of other options, however, including switching to a different GLP-1.

"I tell them: it's not game over," the endocrinologist said.

Indeed, Griffin told the AP that she eventually switched over to Zepbound, a similar drug made by Eli Lilly — and that within just three months, she'd lost seven pounds.

"I’m hoping it’s slow and steady," the woman said.

More on GLP-1s: The Diet Industry Is Reportedly in Total Meltdown Over GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs

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Woman Annoyed When She Gets on Wegovy and It Does Nothing